Fifty years ago, Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen became the last criminals to be
executed in Britain. Nisha Lilia Diu tells their story.

"At half past seven in the morning, all the prisoners started tapping their cell doors: bang, bang, bang. It just went on. As we got nearer to eight o’clock they started banging quicker: bang, bang, bang, bang. And at eight o’clock exactly they all banged once, hard, and then stopped dead. And I thought, 'That’s the moment he’s been hung.' The hairs on the back of my neck went up, they really did. I remember it to this day."

On August 13 1964 Dennis Owen was in Walton Jail operating a radio link "so if anything happened, we could call for back-up." Owen, 25, was an officer in the Liverpool City Police, and on that day the last executions in Britain took place. At precisely the moment Peter Allen dropped to his death in Liverpool, his accomplice, Gwynne Evans, was hanged 35 miles away in Manchester’s Strangeways prison. There were no upsets at either prison.

"I told the control room that the poor bloke had been dispatched without any problems," Owen says.

Barely 18 weeks earlier Allen and Evans had bludgeoned to death one of Evans’s acquaintances, a 53-year-old bachelor called John West. "It was very swift justice but that was commonplace in those days," Steve Fielding, the crime writer and historian, says. "There were cases when it was just 30 days from murder to hanging."

More often, like Allen and Evans, the convicted would spend a few weeks in the "condemned cell" within the prison, a large, bare room with a locked door in it. Behind it, and unbeknown to them, was the execution chamber. When the prisoner was walked to the gallows, he was on the trapdoors almost before he could register it.

Hangmen were competitive about the speed of their jobs. A veteran of more than 400 hangings, Albert Pierrepoint used to boast that he could do the whole thing – from walking into the condemned cell to pulling the lever – in under ten seconds. The hangman would enter the condemned cell on the stroke of the appointed hour, pull the prisoner’s arms behind his back and march him on to the trapdoors in the execution chamber. The hood and noose would immediately be placed over his head and the lever pulled.

"And then," the hangman Syd Dernley wrote in his memoirs, "there was an enormous boom which over half the prison must have heard as those massive trapdoors crashed against the wall of the pit. It was over." The first execution Dernley witnessed was carried out by Albert Pierrepoint. "In the quiet which followed," Dernley remembered, "I heard an official say, 'Eight seconds. Well done!’"

Pierrepoint liked to light a cigar just before the hour, leaving it in the ashtray and returning to it, still lit, when the businesses was done.

He retired in 1956 and Evans and Allen were hanged by Harry Allen and Robert Stewart, respectively. Harry Allen had adopted some of Pierrepoint’s showmanship, donning a bowler hat and one of a selection of colourful bow ties when he was on the job. Some of these, along with his tape measure, pliers and a trunk of ropes, are now owned by Mike James, the publisher of True Crime Library, who has given them on loan to Wandsworth Prison. (They can be seen by appointment with Stewart McLaughlin, honorary curator of the prison museum.)

Evans, 24, had briefly worked with John West at the Lakeland Laundry in Lancashire. When he was arrested, he said, "Jack [sic] West has been a friend of mine for five years and he told me that if I was ever short of money he would always lend me a couple of quid. I knew he had a load of cash."

He and Peter Allen, 21, decided to pay West a visit at 1am on Tuesday, April 7. They took Allen’s wife, Mary, a cinema usherette, and their two small children along for the ride. According to Mary’s police statement, when the two men came out of the house "they were running."

"They just drove off as fast as they could. I asked them what was wrong and they said that Sandy’s [her nickname for Evans] friend couldn’t lend them any money. Peter took his jacket off and when I picked it up by the collar all my hand was wet. When I asked what it was Sandy turned the light on in the car." It was slick with blood.

At the time Evans was lodging with the Allens at 2 Clarendon Street, Preston. "It was quite a rough town at that stage," John Stewart, then a junior detective on the case, says. "I think we dealt with 11 murders in 14 months." He remembers Allen coming into the CID office in Preston. "I was told to sit with Allen and not to speak to him about anything except for the weather."

"He was wearing a style of jumper that was very popular at the time, with a knitted pattern on the back, a leaping salmon. The other one was a little man but this one was tall. Rather pale face. Quite a big lad. Not dishevelled, but not very healthy-looking."

At first the pair denied the murder, but Evans had left several items in West’s house, including a medallion inscribed with his name. Allen was the first to crack. Having claimed they were all at home doing nothing on Monday night, he suddenly became flustered and requested a match.

"Was given a match and lit a cigarette," the transcript of his interrogation notes. "Struck the desk with his fist," it continues. "Buried his head in his arm and was silent for a few seconds. He then crumpled up a piece of paper on which Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Watson had made some notes. A: That’s lies. All right. I’ll tell you. I’d like to tell the whole flipping world about it."

"It started off as an innocent robbery," Allen told Watson. They were unemployed, behind on the rent and owed £10 each in fines for thefts committed earlier that year. They went to a garage in Preston, "pinched a car" and drove to West’s house at 28 Kings Avenue in Seaton. Evans entered the property alone "and came out for me about ten to three".

Evans said, "I knocked on Mr West’s door and he said, 'I didn’t expect to see you tonight.’" He added, "He asked me to go to bed with him. I don’t know whether anyone knows it or not but West was a homosexual." Evans claimed to have turned the man down but his raincoat was later found on the back of a chair in West’s bedroom, and when West’s body was discovered he was naked from the waist down.

It seems likely that at some point Evans asked for money and, finding it not forthcoming, somehow slipped out to call Allen. When West saw him, Allen told the court, he said, “'Who the bloody hell are you?' When I didn’t answer he came at me and made a lunge at me. I panicked, drew back my fist and hit him. The next thing I can remember is seeing Gwynne hitting West with a bar."

When West’s battered body was found lying at the foot of the stairs the next morning, the pathologist noted 25 separate injuries, including a stab wound to the heart.

John West was murdered in 1964, by the last people to be hanged in Britain.

Allen concluded his statement by saying, "I am glad I was caught as I could not have lived noing [sic] I had helped in taking a human life."

Evans was less repentant. His psychiatric assessment describes him as "easily induced to laugh. It was apparent to me that he enjoyed the notoriety associated with his present predicament. He is a glib and fluent liar, repeatedly changing his version of events."

On July 7 Evans and Allen were found guilty of capital murder at Manchester Crown Court. When Mr Justice Ashworth delivered the sentence, the black cap was placed on his head.“As both of you know, for the crime of which you have in my judgement been rightly convicted the law provides only once sentence,” he said.

Nonetheless, nobody actually expected them to hang. There had been no executions so far in 1964, and only two the year before. Ten years before that, in 1952, there had been 23. A reprieve seemed certain, particularly given that the perpetrator of a very similar murder had been granted one earlier that year.

There had been increasingly significant moves to end the death penalty since the Second World War, mostly led by the Labour MP for Nelson and Colne, Sydney Silverman. By the time of the 1957 Homicide Act, which dramatically reduced its application, the public and parliament alike had grown wary of it.

Public horror at the case of Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950, was still relatively fresh. He had been convicted of the murder of his baby daughter (his wife, Beryl, was also murdered but her case was "left on file"). Evans accused his neighbour John Christie of the killing.

Three years later, when Christie moved out of his flat in Rillington Place, west London, the bodies of six women, including his wife, Ethel, were found there. After arrest he confessed to killing all six as well as Beryl, and was hanged for murder.

There was also unease in 1953 when 19-year-old Derek Bentley was executed for the shooting of a police officer by his friend Christopher Craig, who at 16 was too young to hang. According to witnesses, the officer had said, "Hand over the gun, lad." Bentley then shouted, "Let him have it, Chris," which was interpreted in court as an instruction to fire.

Then in 1955 there was Ruth Ellis. When the nightclub hostess was hanged for shooting her abusive on-off boyfriend, David Blakely, the outcry was loud and prolonged. The tide was slowly turning against capital punishment.

But it was too slow for Evans and Allen. The men appealed twice, and their mothers wrote to the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, begging for clemency. To no avail.

The night before his hanging Allen threw himself at the glass partition that separated him from his wife, smashing the glass and breaking his hand. His executioner, Robert Stewart, noted that he shouted, "Jesus!" as he was led to the drop.

The death penalty for murder was suspended for a trial period a year later. It was abolished altogether in 1969, almost exactly a century after the banning of public hangings in 1868.

Then, crowds of 30,000 were common at Newgate in London. "Even here you’d get a crowd of 8,000," Colin Penny, the museum manager at Lancaster Castle, the scene of countless executions over 1,000 years, says. By then, he says, hangings had become "very solemn occasions. Newspapers reported men removing their hats when the person to be hanged was led out to the gallows, and visible shudders passing through the crowd when the trapdoor opened."

"Seventy or 80 years earlier," he adds, hangings had been "almost like a fair. There would be hawkers of various kinds, people selling pies, jugglers."

This was the era of the Bloody Code, when more than 200 crimes – including sheep stealing, trespassing and poaching – were capital offences. It was also the era of the "short drop", when a stool was kicked from beneath the feet of the culprit, leaving him to die by strangulation. It could take an hour to die.

Eventually, in the 1870s, the London executioner William Marwood developed the "long drop", intended to break the neck instantly. While not universally popular with executioners – William Calcraft, Britain’s longest-serving hangman, refused to adopt the more merciful practice and was subsequently retired in 1874, after 45 years of service – it was used until abolition.

The "long drop" requires a precise calculation, using the person’s height and weight to determine the distance he should fall. Too short, and it would cause death by strangulation. Too long, and it would tear his head off. This was the fate of one John Conway in 1892. His hangman, James Berry, quit the job for good as a result.

Indeed, many executioners were traumatised by their experiences. John Ellis, Britain’s chief executioner in the early 1900s, slit his own throat to escape the memories.

Yet there was no shortage of hopefuls: about 250 people a year in the early 1960s submitted speculative applications. Britain had two chief executioners and typically four assistant executioners working at any one time, and they would hold their positions for years. In the rare event of an opening, unsavoury types were weeded out by a psychological exam, with the successful few going on to a week’s training at Pentonville Prison.

Robert Stewart emigrated to South Africa shortly after abolition and never talked about his job, as far as we know. Harry Allen, on the other hand, was "quite happy to tell you all about it", according to Robert Douglas, a Birmingham police officer who met Allen when he hanged Russell Pascoe, whom Douglas had been guarding.

"I said, 'What was the most you’ve done?' He said, 'At Nuremberg we did 27 in two hours and 40 minutes.' They hanged them three at a time in a gymnasium. Harry was quite proud of that."

Harry Allen relaxes at home with his wife, Doris, in 1970 (Photo by REX)

Allen’s widow, Doris, tells me he was "a very jolly person, always full of life". Did the job ever weigh heavy on him? "No, no, no, he never gave it a thought. He believed in it – that if they’d murdered somebody that was it. I agreed with him. I still do."

Support for capital punishment is on a gradual global decline. It is down to 51 per cent in Britain, according to the latest YouGov poll, in September 2010 – still significantly higher than in most of Europe, but lower than in America, where support has also fallen, to 60 per cent.

"Throughout history, if a jury has the chance to sentence criminals to something other than death, they will typically take that opportunity," says Prof Mitchel Roth at the Sam Houston State University in Texas, the author of the forthcoming book An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment.

"Even in Texas," he says, "now we have life without parole, we see people being sentenced to death a lot more rarely. In 2000 40 men were executed, against 13 in 2013."

Prof Jim Sharpe of the University of York, who is writing A Fiery & Furious People: The History of Violence in England, agrees. "In every social group in England we’ve begun to see violence as an inappropriate and ineffective way to solve problems," he says.

A common argument for the death penalty is that it acts as a deterrent, but extensive research on the subject has proved inconclusive.

Two years after her husband hanged, Mary Allen agreed to give an interview. She had had a difficult time, repeatedly dismissed from jobs when her history was discovered. Remarried, she refused to share her new name. "I need to start again for the sake of the babies," she said.

She told an anecdote of when she and her new husband did a newspaper quiz one morning. One of them, realising too late what they were saying, read out loud, "Who were the last men to be hanged in England?" She realised with some shock that she had become a part of history.